"I love Fluxx. It's most certainly untrue that there
is no strategy to the game--sound strategy will increase your
chances of winning significantly--but it is true that there is
a lot of randomness to the game. That makes it a game that's
wonderfully suited to people who revel in the unexpected and
completely ill-suited to people obsessed with winning every game
they play." -- Jordan, comment #47 added
to the
artcile about Fluxx on BoingBoing

2007
was a very good year for me in my career as a Game
Designer. My previous works continued to gain both commercial
and critical success, with Fluxx selling its 400,000th copy,
Treehouse
receiving the Origins Award for Best Board Game of the Year,
and Icebreaker
2 finally getting published for the 3DO. More importantly,
over the course of the year I designed six more games:

It's interesting to see how long some games take to finish
-- and how others can get done incredibly quickly. Black ICE
took just a few weeks to go from idea to printed rulebook, and
I posted the complete rules for Twin Win just 15 days after inventing
it. Other games, like Just
Desserts, have been in the works literally for years and
yet are still not close to becoming a finished product. (Then
there are games like Nanofictionary,
which we published over
5 years ago but which I'm now in the
process of redesigning. But that's another story.)

Anyway, it was almost exactly a year ago that I first started
tinkering up ideas for a game using the new Stonehenge game system,
and as always it's really cool to finally have a copy of finished
game in my hand. But it's a little different this time, since
Looney Labs isn't the publisher of this game.

The Stonehenge "Anthology Board Game" is a system
much like my own Icehouse
game system: a collection of attractive game components you
can play a bunch of totally different abstract board games with.
Unlike Icehouse, the system includes both a board and a much
more concrete theme, but the components are similarly flexible
and inspirational.

The
basic set includes parts for 5 players and rules for 5 games
designed by 5 "World-Class" Game Designers. The expansion
set, called Nocturne, includes parts for 2 more players along
with rules for another 4 games. Obviously, it was quite an honor
to have been commissioned to design something for this new system,
and I'm very pleased with the game I was able to create for it.

The perfect theme for my game became obvious as soon as I
started studying the history of Stonehenge for this purpose.
With 5000+ years of historical events to draw from, the setting
provides plenty of options even without invoking alien spacecraft,
time travel, or an army of ghosts. Richard Garfield did a game
about the original construction of Stonehenge, Bruno Faidutti
wrote one about politics and elections between tribes of ancient
druids, and James Ernest used the setting of the Dark Ages for
a game in which blocks from Stonehenge are being auctioned off
and removed for use as building materials.

Anyway, my game is one of the most historically accurate,
since it was inspired by a series of events we know really happened
at the ancient monument: the Free Festivals of the 1970s! Since
everyone knows I'm an unabashed hippie, I couldn't resist making
my game just a big counterculture party. And it's fun, too! It's
vaguely like Chrononauts
in that there's a lot going on, your goals can change, and there
are three different ways to win. (I'm also pretty sure I'll be
able to play it during Andy
vs. Everybody, but I haven't actually tried that yet.)

Nocturne includes three other games by yet more big-name designers:
Sun & Moon, by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, The Stargate, by
Serge Laget & Bruno Cathala, and Battle of the Beanfield,
by Mike Selinker. The last of these is a solitaire game that
was an unexpected addition to the set. Mike was inspired to create
it after reading in the introduction to my game about the massacre
that brought the Free Festivals to an end, and it proved to be
so much fun they decided to include it as a bonus game.

Like most of the products listed on the new Who
Else Has Gone Looney? page, the Nocturne expansion (and Stonehenge
itself, since it's required for Nocturne) is for sale at our
webstore. Even though we aren't the publishers, we've arranged
with these other companies to be able to sell these items too,
so that LooneyLabs.com.
can provide you with one-stop shopping for all your Looney needs.

I've just discovered that OlderGames.com (the company which
published my long-awaited sequel to Icebreaker
last summer) went out of business in December. The company that
bought their assets has been using eBay to liquidate their unsold
goods, but all their copies of Icebreaker 2 are already gone.
Now I wish I'd gotten a few extra copies of it while I had the
chance! Oh well, at least it finally got through the encryption
process and is playable now in a few places other than just my
house...

Last week I got a big kick out of seeing the characters in
the webcomic Weregeek
playing a card game which is clearly Fluxx. Apparently the
action takes place in the future, since they're playing a Pirate-themed
edition I haven't invented yet; either that, or they've loaded
up their deck with a bunch of Fluxx
Blanxx and their own wacky ideas...

I've been a fan of the music from Sweeny Todd ever since
1982, but I approached the Tim Burton movie with apprehension.
I finally went with Renee (she's a huge fan - this was her 9th
viewing) and I did find a lot to enjoy. The violence was way
too over-the-top for my tastes, as I was expecting, but it was
always well enough telegraphed for squeamish people like me to
look away as needed, and most other elements were really quite
good. So at first I liked it. However, I became increasingly
disappointed later, when I listened again to the original album
and realized how much of my favorite music was missing from the
film. Not only are whole songs missing, but key verses are gone
from many of the songs they did include. So if you see the movie
and crave the music afterwards, get the original album (featuring
Angela Lansbury) rather than the movie soundtrack.